In March 2020 the World Health Organization announced a pandemic outbreak. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) is the causative pathogen for the coronavirus disease-19 (COVID-19) pandemic. The authorities worldwide use clinical science to identify infected people, but this approach is not able to track all symptomatic and asymptomatic cases due to limited sampling capacity of the testing laboratories. This drawback is eliminated by the Wastewater-Based Epidemiology (WBE) approach. In this review, we summarized the peer-reviewed published literature (available as of 28^th September 2020), in the field of WBE. The commonly used steps (sampling, storage, concentration, isolation, detection) of the analytical protocols were identified. The potential limitations of each stage of the protocols and good practices were discussed. Finally, new methods for the efficient detection of SARS-CoV-2 were proposed.

2020 年 3 月，世界卫生组织宣布爆发大流行。严重急性呼吸综合征冠状病毒 2 (SARS-CoV-2) 是冠状病毒病 19 (COVID-19) 大流行的病原体。世界各地的当局利用临床科学来识别感染者，但由于检测实验室的采样能力有限，这种方法无法追踪所有有症状和无症状的病例。基于废水的流行病学 (WBE) 方法消除了这一缺点。在这篇综述中，我们总结了 WBE 领域经过同行评审的已发表文献（截至 2020 年 9 月²⁸日）。确定了分析方案的常用步骤（采样、储存、浓缩、分离、检测）。讨论了协议每个阶段的潜在局限性和良好实践。最后，提出了有效检测 SARS-CoV-2 的新方法。